‘VisionQuest’ Review: Paul Bettany and James Spader Elevate Disney+’s Sometimes Moving, Sometimes Exhausting Marvel Spinoff

VisionQuest opens with a trip down memory lane. Really, it kind of has to. The latest Disney+ drama is a spinoff to a spinoff, picking up a now-11-year-old storyline that’s grown almost incomprehensibly gnarled even by the multiversal standards of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Fans who’ve followed this story from day one would probably still welcome a refresher.

The problem is what follows, which are still more trips down memory lane, branching out every which way to dig deeper and deeper into the past. When VisionQuest does let itself come up for air, it can be quite touching, anchored by a Paul Bettany performance that mines new layers from a character he’s inhabited for over a decade, and a James Spader one that’s a better use of his smarmy appeal than his introduction in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. But even as the characters reflect at length on the virtue of putting themselves out there, their series too often retreats within itself instead.

As the series finds Vision (Bettany) — who is not the sentient synthezoid who died in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, nor the one who starred in the sitcom parts of 2021’s WandaVision, but the blank-slate version introduced in the non-sitcom parts of WandaVision, but then installed with the memories of the one from the sitcom parts of WandaVision, and if you’re confused by all that, a major theme of VisionQuest is that he is too. Anyway, he’s been laying low, passing as an ordinary human bartender in Edinburgh.

It’s a quiet life, but one that allows for time to mull over his two primary concerns. One is humankind, and our confounding and contrary ways. The other is his selfhood. This Vision can access his predecessor’s memories but can’t quite feel them, which makes him feel adrift and inferior.

His loneliness is somewhat mitigated by the other sentient AIs he’s uploaded to his mindspace, envisioned by creator Terry Matalas (Syfy’s 12 Monkeys) as a big white house on a purposefully digital green lawn. Those include J.A.R.V.I.S. (Brian D’Arcy), the brotherly butler who handles security; F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), who offers socialization tips like “You were smiling, which is good, but too much, which is bad”; and Ultron (Spader), the megalomaniac Vision has imprisoned partly for sentimental reasons. (He is sorta-kinda Vision’s dad, after all.)

But Vision’s peace is disturbed when he’s pursued by Paladin (Todd Stashwick), an elite assassin whose hiring may or may not be connected to a serial killer known as “Butcherbird.” One thing leads to another, and soon Vision finds himself on the run with Thomas (Ruaridh Mollica), an 18-year-old grifter who’s actually the reincarnation of his super-speedster son with his late witchy wife Wanda.

VisionQuest is most effective as a story about a long-lost father and son finding their way back toward each other amid impossible circumstances. Mollica bring to Thomas the disarming innocence of a young man who wants to know better than to get his hopes up, but can’t help himself anyway. Bettany is by turns hilariously perplexed, in the universal manner of parents engaging with teens everywhere, and achingly tender, in the more unusual way of a robot letting himself be overwhelmed by feeling for the first time.

The chemistry between them is strong enough to suggest depths that go under-explored by a narrative that only has so much time for the emotional nuances of finding out the robot dad/magical son you thought couldn’t possibly exist not only does, but is standing in front of you asking for a hug.

More surprisingly, VisionQuest’s second most effective mode is as a love story. A major subplot involves Ultron’s flirtation with a likeminded synthetic, Jocasta (T’Nia Miller), the potential consequences of which are both dramatically apocalyptic and, this many iterations into the Marvel formula, utterly textbook. But there’s real pleasure in watching Miller and Spader (mostly allowed to look like himself, rather than a CG hunk of metal) circle each other over simulated glasses of whiskey, purring about how “a romance between you and I would have casualties.” (“One can only hope it would be both of us at the same time,” comes the reply.)

The sparks between them are earnestly sexy in a way Marvel rarely allows itself to be — albeit still PG in practice — and, as their mutual interest deepens beyond plans for world domination, weirdly moving.

All of which is to say: This show is at its best when it’s simply focusing on its lead characters and sitting in the dynamics between them. But VisionQuest has too much else on its mind, and too few ideas for how to explore them.

Vision’s identity crisis is reflected and refracted in nearly all the characters around him, which makes sense when it’s Thomas having panic attacks triggered by memories of a childhood he knows logically cannot be real (even though they are, because magic). It feels unnecessary when we’re learning for no apparent reason that Paladin had a pretty hard time growing up too, or that Vision’s recreational AI E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire) was based on a human woman we’ve never heard of and have no reason to care about.

It starts to get downright exhausting when half these tragic backstories turn out to have their own tragic backstories. In VisionQuest, there’s always another level down in the generational trauma sub-basement.

Collectively, it amounts to an inordinate amount of the season’s eight hours being spent on people just … explaining things. Occasionally, VisionQuest does this in a clever way, as with an inventive late sequence that borrows from WandaVision‘s sitcom language. But too often, it just means characters sitting around recounting their origin stories, having their origin stories recounted to them, reflecting on what their origin stories mean to each other. Sometimes, for a change of pace, they detour into languorous flashbacks, or literally just watch clips of WandaVision.

Ostensibly, all of this soul-searching is in the service of getting Vision to finally start to live the life he’s previously only watched play out in the cinema of his mind palace — to try new things, make new friends, open himself up to joy and love and the pain that can come with them. Instead, I found myself wanting to lean over to dear sweet Vision to gently suggest he try getting out of his own airless headspace and go touch some non-digital grass.